KDE Wants Open Cloud

A new subproject named ownCloud has emerged from the KDE Camp 2010 conference in San Diego.

KDE developer Frank Karlitschek presented ownCloud, the first real extension of his Social Desktop initiative. Users today no longer have applications only on their desktop, but from numerous online services; however, it's proven difficult (to impossible) for users to combine these apps, such as blogger weblogs with Yahoo graphics.

Help should come from an open technical standard for social online networks and related services. When enough providers start implementing the interface, users can have more independent control of their data and maintain their own clouds. The first potential participant in ownCloud is reportedly Maemo.org and the KDE forums. The technology could contribute to the KDE Get Hot New Stuff (GHNS) framework together with the openSUSE build service.

The ownCloud team currently has ahomepage and a Git repository;. The next two months should produce version 1.0, including a WebDAV interface under an open source license.